Thursday, 31 January 2013

Exploring Lafonia (Jan. 30, Frithjof)

In flight from Sea Lion Island to Stanley

I am writing today’s
blog in the back of a 4WD with Pieter at the steering wheel and Alexandra and
Aldo trying to make up for some sleep missed last night. We are heading from
Stanley to North Arm, the southernmost settlement in East Falkland, where we
had made some very rewarding collections in mid-December 2010. 99% of the roads
in the Falklands are unpaved dust and gravel tracks, which makes for some
pretty tough driving considering the large distances across the East and West
main islands. The southern part of East Falkland is also called Lafonia (after Samuel Fisher Lafone, a wealthy hide and cattle merchant on the Rio
de la Plata in the 1840s).

Working up 3 days of
collections from Sea Lion Island in our improvised lab in the South Atlantic
Environmental Research Institute (SAERI) in historic Stanley Cottage on
Stanley’s waterfront (Ross Road) turned into a night shift from 9 pm to 1.30
am! This is not unusual for such expeditions – you spend the days travelling around,
diving and working in the field, have a dinner, and then go to the lab. We try
to exempt the driver from too much lab work given his tough and responsible
job.

Indeed, collections
were rewarding: around 40 different seaweed species from 3 days of collecting
around the island.

We have just passed
the Argentine cemetery, the villages of Darwin and Goose Green, with a brief
stop at the grave of Nicholas Taylor, a Harrier pilot shot down over Goose
Green in May 1982. Incidentally, he was a friend of Pieter’s neighbour from
Monymusk, Aberdeenshire. For our generation and those older than us, the name
of the tiny village of Goose Green will forever be associated with the bloody
battle that was fought here in May 1982. 31 years on, the memory is still very
much alive – there is still a barn marked “PoW” in the village, and the
Argentine mine field is still there too – like several others around Stanley.